Ephemeral mimetics: memes, an X-ray of Covid-19
Open Access
- 30 December 2021
- journal article
- Published by Estonian Literary Museum Scholarly Press in The European Journal of Humour Research
- Vol. 9 (4), 35-57
- https://doi.org/10.7592/ejhr2021.9.4.558
Abstract
The Covid-19 pandemic has prompted a crisis with consequences for public health, but also with economic, social and cultural implications that have affected all layers of society to a greater or lesser extent. Communication has been impacted by the immediacy and virality of messages and misinformation has galloped across social platforms. Against that backdrop, memes have emerged as a powerful means to channel citizen sentiment. A study of these digital objects is essential to understanding social network-based communication during the pandemic. The qualitative research reported here analyses the role of memes in communication on Covid-19, studies their development and defends their status as one of this generation’s cultural artefacts that, as such, merits preservation. Meme evolution is studied using Kübler-Ross’s stages of grief, which has been applied in a number of contexts involving psychological change. Studying memes in those terms both brings information on the evolution of citizens’ concerns to light and proves useful to sound out social media communication around the pandemic media. The challenges to be faced in meme preservation are defined, along with the ways in which heritage institutions should ensure the conservation of these cultural objects, which mirror early twenty-first century communication and world views and in this case provide specific insight into one of the most significant historic circumstances of recent decades.Keywords
This publication has 31 references indexed in Scilit:
- Identifying the public's concerns and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's reactions during a health crisis: An analysis of a Zika live Twitter chatAmerican Journal of Infection Control, 2016
- The use of memes in the discourse of political parties at Twitter: analysis of the 2015 state of the nation debateCommunication & Society, 2016
- Big Folklore: A Special Issue on Computational FolkloristicsJournal of American Folklore, 2016
- Connecting blog, Twitter and Facebook use with gaps in knowledge and participationCommunication & Society, 2014
- Humour as resistance: Disaster humour in post-9/11 United StatesThe European Journal of Humour Research, 2014
- SpanishIndignadosand the evolution of the 15M movement on Twitter: towards networked para-institutionsJournal of Spanish Cultural Studies, 2014
- An anatomy of a YouTube memeNew Media & Society, 2011
- Pandemics in the Age of Twitter: Content Analysis of Tweets during the 2009 H1N1 OutbreakPLOS ONE, 2010
- Describing the emotional states that are expressed in speechSpeech Communication, 2003
- Media culture and Internet disaster jokesEuropean Journal of Cultural Studies, 2002